Well, they finally granted permission to demolish the old grain silo I mentioned in a previous entry. It made the front pages of the local papers this week, and true to typical developer form, they started the teardown virtually immediately. There were quite a few people standing around looking at the derelict site when I went past on Sunday. I stopped to mingle for a bit and just listened to what folks had to say.

It’s funny the things you hear. Rumours were flying that it was secretly a listed building, that it was haunted, that it held the remains of some unfortunate clubbers under a collapsed floor, and even that there were pigeons nailed to the internal walls. I guess all these local urban myths and legends are about to be swept away, eventually becoming the concrete footings for someone else’s new development.

Funny, though, that I managed to capture this shot only minutes after overhearing the bit about the pigeons… makes you wonder if there was some truth to the stories after all. … csj

To catch the stark, derelict nature of the site before it vanished, I leaned on the trusty Canon EOS 20D. I was shooting at 17mm, allowing me to frame it tight and cut out the surrounding distractions. Dropping the exposure bias to -0.3 helped me hold onto the gritty textures in the fading light, keeping the shutter speed at a crisp 1/200th.

• taken|17 february, 2008
• camera|Canon EOS 20D
• focal length|17mm
• aperture|f/10
• shutter speed|1/200s
• iso|100
• flash fired|no
• exposure bias|-0.33 ev

capture date | 18.02.2008
camera | Canon EOS 20D
lens | 17-40mm f/4 L Series
focal length | 17mm
aperture | f/10
shutter speed | 1/200
shooting mode | manual
exposure bias  | -0.3
metering mode | pattern
ISO | 100
flash | no
image quality | RAW
RAW converter | Photoshop CS2
cropped? | 2×1